When coming to the College of Staten Island to study Electrical Engineering my goals were to work hard and acquire enough knowledge in the field to be able to make a difference in people’s lives. In my senior year I spoke with Asher, a fellow Verrazzano student, about research pertaining to the elderly and the issues they go through on a day-to-day basis. It was really eye-opening to learn about the elderly’s struggles with falling and how many of these falls result in injuries and/or worse, and about their struggles with keeping a healthy Beats Per Minute (BPM) and the issues than an elevated BPM can cause.
The research led Asher and I to create the “Smart Cane”. We were inspired to create a cane with multiple technological enhancements that would mitigate the issues that we had learned about. The plan for the project was to create three different subsystems that could help the elderly in their day-to-day lives. The first subsystem was denoted as the Distance Monitoring Subsystem, which can observe upcoming obstacles using an Ultrasonic sensor and alert the user of the cane using vibration motors and a buzzer that work at different frequencies depending on the distance measured. The second subsystem was the Beats Per Minute monitoring subsystem which can measure the user’s Beats Per Minute (BPM). If the measured value is greater than 100 BPM it sends a message to an application that a caretaker or relative can monitor. The third subsystem was denoted as the LED Flashlight subsystem, which utilized a push button on the handle of the cane to turn on and off LEDs contained at the ground level of the cane to assist the user in the dark.
There are many things Asher and I talked about doing with the “Smart Cane” that weren’t achievable due to time constraints and with having a very limited budget. If the project were to be continued, we would have added a speaker to subsystem 1 that outputs the distance of the objects detected by the Ultrasonic sensor through verbal direction. Our original plan was to utilize 3D printing to create the model for the cane; however, we ultimately opted to use a Swiffer as it offered us the ability to store the circuitry at the bottom of the “Smart Cane”. There are other issues that the elderly face that we could have looked into developing subsystems for.
The development of the “Smart Cane” not only provided me with information I was unaware of in relation to the elderly, but also with knowledge pertaining to the field I studied for four years. The capstone project helped me learn how to code using Arduino IDE. It also helped me learn about components such as the Ultrasonic sensor, HC-05 Bluetooth module, and Pulse sensor, all which have fascinating inner workings and could be components I work with as I continue my journey deeper into the field of Engineering.
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